13.7.14

DEEP PURPLE - Trouble In Jakarta

This is an extract from my Deep Purple biography published in 1983, about the group’s disastrous visit to Indonesia in December
1975.

The
book was ‘authorised’ insofar as some of the group (Jon Lord, Ian Paice, Ian
Gillan, Roger Glover and Glenn Hughes) all gave me interviews, as did both
their managers, two record producers and some members of their road crew.
Ritchie Blackmore declined for reasons best known to himself and my planned
interview with David Coverdale fell through because his disagreeable manager
wanted to set conditions that I found unacceptable. No-one vetted the manuscript, however, and the
book was remarkably candid, far more so than most authorised biogs that simply serve
as PR exercises, perhaps because at the time no one thought that Deep Purple had an afterlife beyond the split in 1976. Jon Lord proved especially forthright in telling his story, a
true gent.

In
November 1975 Purple flew from Hawaii to New Zealand for one show, and then to
Australia for five. Japan was next on the itinerary but a promoter in Indonesia got in touch and proposed they stop off on the way for a show in
Jakarta – but when they got there things went terribly wrong…

From Australia Purple were scheduled to fly north to
Japan but on the way a concert had been arranged at the Indonesian capital of
Jakarta. Their brief visit to this undemocratic island nation was shattered by
the most distressing event in the entire history of the
group: a week later reports reached the English press that a member of their
security staff had been killed ‘after falling down a lift shaft’. What is
certain is that Patsy Collins, their affable Cockney bodyguard, was never seen
again and that tour manager Rob Cooksey was ripped off to the tune of $750,000.
The episode has never been fully explainedd.

“It was
a set-up,” says Cooksey who even now is reluctant to talk anout the matter.
“The story from the word go was that we were due to play a theatre in Jakarta
that held 7,000 people and, as we were on our way from Australia to Japan and
had our own plane, it seemed like a good way to pick up some extra money. I’d
been approached by an Indonesian guy called Danny Sabri and he sent us a
deposit of $11,000. That’s all we ever got.”

When
Cooksey arrived and went to inspect the venue he received his first shock.”It
was an enormous outdoor stadium that held 125,000 people and they had never
promoted a concert like this before. The stage was made from orange boxes and
the security was the Army who were in total control and in league with the
promoters.

“Initially I told Sabri that we weren’t
gong to play for the price agreed and I wanted to call the whole thing off but
he insisted we could re-negotiate. They’d also planned a second show the
folowing night which we knew nothing about until we got there.”

The first concert was performed
before over 100,000 people in a state of some apprehension and Cooksey realised
that, taking into account the ticket price and calculating Deep Purple’s
concert fee on the same basis as their American concerts, the group’s gross for
the two shows ought to have been in the region of $750,000. He demanded a
meeting with the promoters at Purple’s hotel after the show.

“It started off quite pleasantly
and then developoed into an argument. Then they left me alone. Very soon after
that there was an incident on one of the floors and Patsy was killed after
falling six floors down a lift shaft. He fell through these central heating and
pipes and water ducts right through into the basement but it didn’t kill him
instantly. He crawled out and got into a minibus outside the hotel and just
murmured ‘hospital, hospital’. He died shortly after that.”

Cooksey was woken up at 4am and,
with Glen Hughes and the second bodyguard – “Paddy the Plank” – taken to the
police station and informally charged with being implicated in Collins’ murder.

“It’s my opinion it was a set up
to get me out of the way,” says Cooksey. “The band had to play again that night
and they were quite literally taken from the hotel at gunpoint and pushed up on
to the stage. They let Glenn out to do it but they’d only played for 20 minutes
when the place went crazy. The crowds rioted and the police set dogs on them.”

Cooksey remained in a jail
overnight and, with Hughes and Paddy, was brought before a hearing the
following morning. “The judge looked like some General Amin type, all medals
everywhere, and he had this big revolver which he kept playing with... he kept
spinning the cylinder and putting bullets into it. He said in his opinion the
whole thing had been a tragic accident and all we had to do was go through the
formality of having our passports photostatted. The bottom line was we paid
$2,000 to get our passports back.”

From the courthouse the trio were
taken to the airfield where the plane was waiting with the rest of the group
and crew on board. But their problems weren’t over yet. “One of the wheels had
a puncture and the captain requested the use of a special jack and torque
wrench but we had to pay $10,000 to use it… plus they didn’t have anyone there
who knew how it worked. [Roadies] Ozzie Hoppe, Baz Marshall, myself and the engineer
from the plane ended up changing a wheel… on a Boeing 707. Feelings were
running so high at this point that there was a plot hatched to grab one of
these officious little Indonesians and throw him out somewhere over the ocean
on our way to Japan. Fortunately I heard about it and scotched it.

“It was a horrendous experience. We
lost Patsy and we should have made three quarters of a million dollars but in
Indonesia there is nothing you can do. When I was in prison Ozzie Hoppe called
our lawyer in Los Angeles and he flew to Indonesia just after we left. He
arranged a meeting with the promoter but they chased him around the room with a
machete. He landed in Tokyo not long after we did and said ‘forget it’. We just
had gto write it off.”

Patsy Collins was a well liked
figure on the London music scene, an employee of the Artisrs Services security
company and a frequent visitor to the Speakeasy Club and other haunts of rock
musicians. He had worked for several well known acts and, with his usual
partner ‘Fat Fred’ had been featured in a hilarious aticle in Melody Maker in which their exploits
were graphically described by writer Roy Hollingworth. Romantic stories that
Patsy never died and for reasons best known to himself decided to concoct a
story with an anonymous confidante and disppear into the anonyminity of the
Australian outback are whispered even now. While his fondness for cold lager
provides the flimsiest of motives, no one in the Deep Purple camp seems to have
actualy seen the body. There the matter must rest.

1 comment:

Wow, amazing story Chris. Thanks. Hell, that incident alone could make for quite a book! Saw DP late in their career, 1985 Perfect Strangers tour at the Spectrum. They were amazing. Some of the best musicians I've ever seen.